We love our friends. YWM encourages you to speak out against the MSM. Today’s guest blogger is Andrea Asprelli.

It didn’t take long for the newly appointed conservative columnist at the New York Times to come out fighting. Known for his quips about the evolutionary advantage of women’s difficulty in achieving orgasm (it motivates them to raise children in monogamous relationships) and the pill being a real turnoff, Ross Douthat’s most recent musing is to harp on that old husband’s tale: a liberated woman is an unhappy one.

To be fair, Douthat’s take on the paper “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” speaks more to his inability to read than the authors’ inability to write. Jezebel has already gone to great lengths to refute most of Douthat’s interpretation of the paper, including an emphasis on the authors’ discussion of the difficulties of taking self-reported happiness levels at face value (particularly in this case, as women’s expectations for happiness and the spheres in which they can expect it have greatly fluctuated in the past 30 years).

But accuracy of data aside, I have to ask, what is Douthat getting at? Perhaps his attempt to soften his usual blowhard style for the Times has left us with only a watered-down drizzle of his actual point. Regardless, he starts off running a line I didn’t expect to see in the New York Times in 2009:

“But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness… In post-feminist America, men are happier than women.”

That’s right. Despite being wealthier, healthier, better educated, better paid, less abused, less harassed, and possessing greater reproductive freedom, women were happier before feminism.

While he mentions a few legitimate reasons for these “findings,” such as an increase in women who are “stuck raising kids alone” (which he attributes to the “decline of the two-parent family”), increasing workplace responsibilities coupled with stagnant domestic responsibilities, and the high-risk “cowboy capitalism” of the Reagan era, he dismisses all of these as inadequate answers to the problem of female unhappiness. He extrapolates from the article that no, women are not inundated by more household and child-rearing duties than men (huh?) and no, a masculine-driven political culture could not have had an effect on the satisfaction of American women.

So why all those long, feminine faces?

Douthat argues that the solution to the happiness problem is  not in alleviating some of the “challenges of motherhood” (where did fatherhood go?), not in easing the work-parent balance and certainly not in public policy options (like child care or flexible work schedules).

No, Douthat argues that American women are unhappy because of the “advance of single motherhood” and that the necessary answer is “a new kind of social stigma” that ostracizes the sexually irresponsible. Or, in the eloquent words of Jezebel writer Amanda, “women are unhappy because society doesn’t do enough slut-shaming!” To Douthat’s credit—he does advocate equality in slut-shaming for both men and women alike. A new era of sexual stigma for all!

Really?

Such is the work of a man interpreting a woman’s problems. Let’s ask some better questions to address the problem—what is going on here? Are women happier in post-feminist America, and what now?

Here are some questions that apparently slipped Douthat’s mind:

• How are career women socially stigmatized? Why is it more difficult for them to find meaningful and functional relationships and marriages?

• How do men help or hurt feminist objectives? How does their social positioning have to change to allow for women’s greater freedoms? Have they made any progress in figuring this out? Do they see it as a necessity?

• And what if women are less happy? Would that mean feminism has failed? Was the point of the movement to seek happiness or freedom?

I’m not sure what Douthat’s point was.

What I do know is that these are the types of questions that should be shaping our national discussion in our top newspapers, not a call for a modern puritanical age.

But the good news is: 29-year-old Ross has just given us an excellent opportunity to open the floodgates.

Andrea Asprelli is Research Assistant at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate. She received her BA in Philosophy and Culture, Health, and Science from Mount Holyoke College.

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